A Rich Man's Trick

[Brian Castle]

Brian and Tracy

I agree laying out the final truth especially about the JFK case is a recipe for failure, as Tracy said.

HOWEVER, there is much to be said for providing a resource that describes the landscape of research distinguishing what is known from what is not yet settled. There are certainly very credible, high quality researchers who are not at all in agreement on certain points. Delineating the points of agreement and disagreement would provide a valuable resource.

I could imagine researchers here producing a series of white papers on various aspects of the investigation with references for the young researcher or interested lay person.

We actually have a JFK Wiki set up here someplace, but I've never had the time and energy to work on it. It would be such an enormous undertaking, properly footnoted, sourced and all.

We actually have a JFK Wiki set up here someplace, but I've never had the time and energy to work on it. It would be such an enormous undertaking, properly footnoted, sourced and all.

Actually, Tracy, I am thinking of projects much less ambitious than the JFK Wiki, not withstanding that the various projects would entail work.

Hi Lauren, hi Tracy - y'all are warming my heart! Talking my language. We're on the same page. (Finally! Whew... for a while I though I was alone in the wilderness or something, lol).

So... how about if I can help? I have an idea, how about this - start with the people. Keep it simple, and provide a growth path that leads to where it needs to end up. And meanwhile, provide a mechanism whereby it can be easily updated in real time. Just like a Wiki - so, y'all are talking about a Wiki, and the scope of that is broad, wiki's are about events, they're about people, they're about models and concepts...

How about this - start simple. First, do "just the people". So, like, a "Who's Who". A list of people. And if done properly, what this will give us eventually is a database of "People" records, upon which we can build "Events", consisting of People who participate in them.

Now - I'm aware of several "Who's Who's" about the JFK case. There is one in book form, and there is another one on the internet (I think it's called A-Z, or something like that).

The "work" involved, is to enter the list of People into the database, with as much supporting information as is desired.

Once the records are in the database, they can be "presented" in any desired form - a wiki, or whatever format happens to be useful.

I don't know about y'all, but I find Wiki's data entry method(s) to be somewhat cumbersome, I don't much like the way they do their annotations for instance - so perhaps some elements of the "technical" side of this, and the "user interface" side of this, could be improved and made a whole lot easier to use and a whole lot more efficient in terms of time and effort and space needed to maintain.

So... I'm a computer guy (one of my many talents, ha ha) - and I could bring up a meat-and-potatoes version of this in record time (a week? maybe two?), and I could do it in such a way that the data would be backed up automatically on a nightly basis so nothing would ever get lost.

And, not only that, I already have seed data. I already have the entire Who's Who list that was originally on the internet, and it has already been embellished with several hundred additional records. Names like IB Hale are probably not on it though, they'd need to be added. And this is where y'all come in, 'cause I just heard about IB Hale for the very first time moments ago, so like, my role in this would be to provide y'all with a convenient data entry and storage method, and I could do that entirely for free for y'all, no stupid ads or nothin' like that... y'know... a real genuine professional research site that brings the information right into the layman's living room and yet is still useful for the serious researcher.

Would y'all be willing to participate in the building of a credible "Who's Who"? I can maintain the entire back end of it at no cost to you, I already have all the facilities in place (or, you can do it yourselves if you wish, I'm not trying to hog information or anything - in fact I'll share not only the database I already have, but all the code I've already written around it, with whoever wants it - and in fact, getting an export of this database should be do'able by anyone at any time, that's one of the wonderful benefits of having data in this form - and you can search it, alphabetically or otherwise - if we do this right we can build on it, and then use it as a building block when we're thinking about more ambitious stuff like broad Wiki's and possibly even things like the timelines that are being discussed in the sticky-thread).

What do you think? Would you be willing to do "a little" work, in terms of participating in the data-entry and data-verification parts of such an effort? If we get enough people to chip in, it wouldn't be that much work for any one individual. And, we'll know when we're "there", when no one's adding any more new names to the list, lol. It wouldn't take that long, I'm pretty sure if we start with what's already there, we could build a very credible repository of People in a very short time.